I work in the IT industry and I need to start learning ESXi. I have an older Dell Poweredge 1950 with 2 dual core 3Ghz CPU's with 16GB RAM that I am going to use for testing purposes as an offsite remote machine. The machine will run a number of OS's (all current consumer MS consumer & server OS's, Linux servers, Linux Desktops, OS X if possible, BSD flavors, etc). I know I have a 60 day trial for 5.0 but is there another version that offers an unlimited license? I know this machine was running ESXi3.5 at it's original location and it ran well. I'm only concerned as to whether it can share the CPU across the various OS's running. I will only be using one OS at once - meaning logged into one at a time - but there will be many running to simulate a real enviornment.
I am also having a problem with getting the system to boot from an ISO on the client machine but it just isn't working. I moved CD/DVD to first in order of boot inthe BIOS but I still get the network boot screen almost immediately. I don't know how to put a file on the local machine/server machine/host. I can hook up a USB drive that has all my ISO's on it and copy them over but I don't know how to do this outside of Linux/MS/BSD/Apple. Can anyone point me to the right place?
You can use the VMware vSphere Hypervior. Take a look at this link:http://www.vmware.com/products/vsphere-hypervisor/overview.html
After you create an account (may you have already one) you will get a licence key for this version (no costs).
Of course this version has limits to the other versions (Standard, Enterprise, Enterprise+).
Regards,
Mario
Thanks, so will learning this get me fairly aquainted with ESXi that is used in teh Corporate world? I have two needs, one for learning and one for a production enviornment.
Thanks again!
If you want to test the enterprise features like vMotion, Storage vMotion, Distributed Switches etc. you can try a 60 day test version of (ESXi Enterprise +, vCenter etc.).
Here you find a compare of all the editions: http://www.vmware.com/products/datacenter-virtualization/vsphere/mid-size-and-enterprise-business/co...
Regards,
Mario